[John James Jacoby]

Screen readers and modified browsers might love lists, but they also love properly coded tables, of which most people really seem to do.

Google “everything you know about css is wrong” and check out how to style lists and div’s as tables, it’s an interesting read also. I don’t agree with it, but it is interesting.

The idea of a DIV is not to nest them, but to use them to DIVIDE content. The idea of a table is to compare data in a relational way. I think if you were going to use lists for forums, you would HAVE TO use DL’s and use dt’s for the headers at the very least, to provide a definition to the content being displayed.

I mean, I see how the argument goes both ways. (Off topic: If you’re really into accessibility, check out my WordPress section 508 theme at http://www.wp508.com? It’s not completely full of content yet, seems I have about 5 half finished projects right now ugh.)

[John Doe]

Ok, it’s a slight fix since it’ll only solve one of the issues (I was having) with integration.

The problem was that I could not for the life of me force bbPress to set a ‘logged_in’ cookie with path ‘/’.

WordPress: domain.com

bbPress: domain.com/forum/

This meant once I’d logged in via bbPress, when I was browsing WordPress (although it set the ‘auth’ cookie fine and I could view wp-admin/) it ‘appeared’ that I was logged out (log in and register link, instead of log out and site admin).

I’d already tried this in bb-config.php, along with the other ‘integration speedups’ bbPress supplied;

$bb->sitecookiepath = '';

I’d also tried setting it to ‘/’ as well, but every time the cookie would not get set.

And here was the culprit; line 673 in bb-settings.php;

$bb->sitecookiepath = rtrim($bb->sitecookiepath, '/');

Then on line 735, it checks if $bb->;sitecookiepath is not set or empty. Otherwise, the ‘logged_in’ cookie for sitecookiepath will not get added to the $cookies array, and hence will not be set when wp_set_auth_cookie is called (specifically line 172, pluggable.php).

Changing the culprit to this fixed it for me;

$bb->sitecookiepath = '/' . trim($bb->sitecookiepath, '/');

The complete fix (for me) was to force all logins, registrations and logouts through bbPress with this in a .htaccess at the WordPress root;

RewriteCond %{QUERY_STRING} action=register

RewriteRule ^wp-login.php forum/register.php [R=301,NC,L]

RewriteCond %{QUERY_STRING} action=logout

RewriteRule ^wp-login.php forum/bb-login.php?logout=1 [R=301,NC,L]

RewriteRule ^wp-login.php$ forum/bb-login.php [R=301,NC]

This actually worked out better for me, since bbPress by nature allows you to skin the login, and users get to enter a little more info for their profile during registration.

Hope this of some help to others!

[kevinjohngallagher]

Thanks mate,

it’s definately a work in progress. the plan of it was not to emulate the CODE of phpBB press, but instead to emulate how it looks. As you can see, the difference between having the positioning and CSS in before the TR / TD is worked out allows theme developer far more options.

And oddly, screen readers and modified browsers LOVE LOVE LOVE lists (ul/li, or dl/dt/dd). they have buttons to skip right past the ones you don’t want based on criteria and this means sifting through the parent/child heirarchy so much easier than tables. For tables screen readers (much like the DOM itself) skips line by line.

So on my website, if you chose Eurpoe, and the first forum was UK. with Nested divs and Lists you could hit next and go to Ireland. With tables you’d go to the next TR, which would be england, then london, then scotland etc.

I want to stress here 2 things,

1) i in no way want to turn bbpress into phpBB, i just figured i’d use it as an example win my layouts, because as bloated as it is, it actually does the nesting output really well.

2) I in no way want this singular issue to be the only thing we’re discussing here. It’s one of many examples where i think we’er going down a particular route.

Finally…@Ipstenu : “I can’t visualize something ‘less rigid’ than the current iteration of bbpress type forms, since tags gives you a rather light level of ‘org’. “

This is feel is the crux of the problem, as long as we have tags (which are great) we feel we’ve a fluid cross pollination forum going on. But if you take tags away for a sec (lets say the users didn’t put them in); then what your left with is 1 list of topics and 1 list of forums. That’s the definition of rigid.

[John James Jacoby]

Wow…

It looks darn near perfect…

If your concern is catering to screen readers, then you know that phpBB is hardly the place to start, as reading the screen outloud to yourself makes no sense at all. Imagine if you couldn’t see what you were listening to, it would be impossible. That’s why (properly coded) tables for forums make sense.

I noticed the topic view was buggered, didn’t want to load and show anything, so I assume that’s under construction… But, that’s pretty super awesome…

[kevinjohngallagher]

“But yes, yes, GOD yes, the documentation whomps. Then again, so did WordPresses back in the day “

Agreed.

But lets learn from those mistakes

[Ipstenu (Mika Epstein)]

There has to be some level of organization to a forum, I think we can agree, since without form you have chaos and a splat list of data. Of course, organizing in a way that ‘makes sense’ is in the eye of the beholder.

I can’t visualize something ‘less rigid’ than the current iteration of bbpress type forms, since tags gives you a rather light level of ‘org’. Yeah, you still need some categories, but I don’t see how this negates a hierarchy, except in the case that bbPress cats are fake and, thus, annoying to me. Thinking back on the other forum software I’ve used, though, it’s all been a bit similar. You have a forum and sub-forums under that. So… okay, if that annoys you then, yes, everyone sucks equally

But what’s ‘better’?

The only option that would meet the no-standard output is something like an XML file that you format how you want. Dunno how you’d sort out hierarchy though. You’d probably have to treat everything as equal (i.e. it’s all ‘posted’) with flags for cat, forum and post in the SQL table to sort out output. But … Yeah, I can’t see how to unstructure it more.

But yes, yes, GOD yes, the documentation whomps. Then again, so did WordPresses back in the day

[John James Jacoby]

Well, I think that a theme designer and a theme developer are two different positions now, and to develop means to program, while to design means to mock the lay-out and intent.

And I’m okay with that.

Also, I think that tables are the most logical way to present forum data without mucking up the content with div’s and span’s. The theme files allow you to code your table rows, heads, bodys, and footers, so you can set your own distinction between cols and rows for accessibility sake.

WordPress suffers from this similarly, with forcing h2’s and ul’s all over the place when they should probably be h3’s or dl’s considering, and the alternative is tricking it into serving what you want, versus just ordering off the menu.

(I must be hungry with all these food analogies.)

Really, I think that you’re right, and that bbPress would benefit from some kind of WordPress-esque codex, because otherwise I’m forced to decompile the included themes and fit them to my needs, which is a good way to learn, but a bad way to be efficient.

[kevinjohngallagher]

Hi _CK_,

Firstly, sorry about the gender thing (I blame going from French to English – to simplify I make everything masculine).

I’ve used the categories in 1.0alpha CK, and they do work wonders in the back end.

You make a number of really good points here, really good ones so if it’s cool I’ll go through them one by one.

It’s not just that I don’t “immediately see the solution” (though I admit I don’t), but lets run with that for a bit There is no documentation, there is no list of tags I can use and their features (e.g. https://codex.wordpress.org/Template_Tags) which starts to make a lot of template development guesswork. Are we honestly at the stage of saying that any theme designer or developer out there now needs to be a PHP guru and also know BBpress inside and out to be able to produce a non-liner theme?

If we are, maybe, just maybe that why we’ve found it so hard to get people to use BBpress; and maybe that’s why almost all of the themes out there look the exactly same.

Heck, even when I did manage to code a solution, I found that so much of the template is NOT in the actual editable template but in the damned /bb-includes/template-fucntions.php file that I was close to giving up. (this btw is another example of how NOT theme developer friendly BBpress is – there is NO documentation on how to overwrite these functions in a theme, and I’m somewhat confident that it’ll need a plugin – which also can’t be distributed in a theme).

I totally understand and am impressed with BB1.0alpha’s understanding of categories and forums in a parent/child hierarchy. The backend totally seems to grasp them – and in fact I’ve used the ‘forum is categories’ plug-in with 0.9 and it worked really well (congratulations and thanks whoever developed it).

But you’ve hit on the crux of the problem with “the data is just not presented outside of loop form because no-one has needed/asked for it yet”.

This is the ‘mindset’ I was talking about originally. You’re coding and what you’ve given this community is amazing and without reproach, so hopefully you won’t mind me using you as en example.

What we’re doing is effectively plastering over the crack. We’re fixing the… visible bit of the problem (does that make sense in English, it’s a bit like “tip of the iceberg” thing which makes no sense in french). Let me hark back to your impressive Unread Posts plug-in (which is wonderful). Rather than actually say ok this FORUM or TOPIC that we’re iterating though has unread posts, you coded a plug-in that ONLY worked it out when building the CSS of the actual forum name. It’s like, shooting the small fish downstream and then having to constantly go back upstream when someone points out that the bigger fishes are still there.

People want Parent/Child? Sure we’ll make the change in the DB and admin.

People want Categories? Sure we’ll give it to them in the DB and admin.

People want to make changes to the template? Sure we’ll only work out if its’ a parent/child in the CSS because no-one has specifically asked us via a letter from the queen to give it to them in the $GLOBAL[‘forum’] variable 2 lines above. I mean, we COULD work it out before hand, but why would we do that, because then people could do what they wanted with the theme and CSS – heck they wouldn’t be stuck to using tables in a linear fashion and… oh, no, wait…

It’s… fire fighting, it’s fixing the visible bit of the problem without actually tackling WHY people might have spotted the issue. It’s not a complaint, truly it’s not, the coding that’s been done is wonderful and I’m always impressed by it; but the mindset the thought process behind these features, isn’t wide enough.

You yourself can see how scarce this and bbshowcase forums are, it’s hardly a bustling thriving community. If we’re honestly waiting for someone to specifically come and ask for processing to be done at the earliest stage possible and not just at the CSS level then we may be waiting a long while.

I appreciate that it’s “Very easy to write a plugin to present the forum data any way you’d like” for someone of your obvious expertise, but not everyone in the community could do that. And while I think I could make a decent stab at it, not everyone here could, and certainly not everyone who could design/develop a theme could. Not to mention that as a THEME we’d need to specify plugins that need to be installed at the same time. Surely the good developers here at BBpress can see that’s not how a THEME works in wordpress.

What we’re effectively doing is adding a double step. We’re saying that to be a theme developer, you need to be able to code PHP plugins and be able to read, sift, assume and work out all the relevant tags/functions/classes/object without any documentation. That’s a massive massive assumption. Which is what my original mindset point was – we’ve effectively built a piece of software that’s really good for us the “open source loving / developing / community” but not good for the average user/owner.

BBpress has so much potential, and whether people in the community think that my particular examples are valid or not (we are all entitled to our opinion), surely we can all agree on certain points:

Making BBpress website structure and look fit into a more wordpress.org format will help people stick around:

Increasing the documentation will make things a lot easier.

Not presuming that template developers are PHP wizards.

Making the structure of the core files match WordPress more.

I, like all of you, want BBpress to be better. But right now we’re going down one path, and the more we go down it, the harder it will be to allow people to take their BBpress forum in it’s own direction.

[John James Jacoby]

lol I gotchya…

I have been working with bbPress for 2 days now, so I can openly admit that my knowledge on the inner workings of it (and maybe its limitations) is limited to those 2 days of study.

From my experience with forum software, the category vs forum debate and struggle basically exists in a similar way, at least I know it does for phpBB. A category is just a forum without the ability to post directly to it, and I think that’s really the only way to do it without joining or adding an additional query that isn’t really necessary.

I think what it sounds like you’re asking for is something more official like what WordPress has in terms of development cycle, acknowledgment, and respect from its developers. I also think that because almost everything for bbPress is a plug-in, that the opportunity for those plug-ins not to play nice with one another is greater.

So, the dilemma is to package these as features within the forum, or allow the community to create those features when they are needed. The big guys bloat their forums with tons of stuff and allow the admin to turn them off, and bbPress does the opposite.

I’m not sure bbPress really has a development plan anymore other than tweaking and steamlining the code to work better with WordPress, and maybe eventually import/export posts from other forum software. I personally think that better user management would be nice, but that brings up how WordPress doesn’t really care about users at all. Ha!

[_ck_]

Actually, the way categories are done in bbPress is in part done for backward plugin compatibility with 0.9 (which will likely be around quite awhile, at least a year, due to it’s performance over 1.0)

And the way it works is just fine too – just because you don’t immediately see the solution you want to breakdown the categories before or after the loop, doesn’t mean it’s not there. bbPress 1.0 truly does understand that a forum is a parent of another and if it’s a category holder for it – the data is just not presented outside of loop form because no-one has needed/asked for it yet. Very easy to write a plugin to present the forum data any way you’d like, and using a single carefully crafted mysql query, you can literally walk the reverse chain of post->topic->forum->category.

If you want forums broken down into categories with say three categories and three tables, either write a plugin or do it in the template to build a new array of $forums[1], $forums[2] etc. But don’t change the original way bbPress works to return $forums as all the forums or it will break existing plugins.

These kinds of feature growing pains were also present in WordPress, I can assure you – I’ve been using WP since 1.5 and I really long for the good old days of 2.0-2.1. The problem is that big leaps tend to break big things, or make them overly complex. WordPress 2.7 is a perfect example of things going very, very wrong with care towards backward compatibility and massive feature bloat, even worse than the 2.3 cookies and tags changes.

bbPress 1.0 is getting more things right from the start than WordPress did – cookies, tags, object cache, are all the more advanced methods right off and will save some headaches for plugin developers down the road (not so much for us 0.9 plugin developers).

Everyone has a different view of what’s missing in bbPress – from my standpoint the two biggest problems are 1. search sucks (so does WordPress’s after half a decade still) and 2. the ability to move posts between topics really needs to be done in the core asap so plugins know how to deal with moving targets.

ps. it’s “her” plugins not “his”

pps. you should be impressed how easy it was to make the topic/forum row affected instead of the title in Unread Posts – I can’t think of any other software that would be so easy. Hidden Forums is another example of the power of bbPress’s filter design.

[geekoid]

Well, now I’ve gone and done it. I installed bbpress 0.9 first then installed WordPress mu 2.6.3. I then tried to turn on integration, and now my bbpress installation is completely broken. I cannot login as I get the error:

bbPress database error: [Table 'web_forums.wp_users' doesn't exist]

SELECT ID FROM wp_users WHERE user_login = 'admin'



bbPress database error: [Table 'web_forums.wp_users' doesn't exist]

SELECT * FROM wp_users WHERE user_login = 'admin'

My databases for WP and BBP are separated. Is there a way to reverse the integration? I cannot drop the database as there are existing users and posts.

I only realised this would be a problem after the fact, when I came here searching for a solution. If anyone is able to help me I’d greatly appreciate it. I’ve searched the forum posts extensively and looked through the bbpress configuration file to no avail. I hope someone can assist as I am at a loss on how to fix this.

[John James Jacoby]

It’s really almost impossible as the role data is serialized within the wp_usermeta table… I was poking around in there and figured it was best left alone, even if it’s not working, it ain’t quite totally broken yet.

I’ve found that when I have everything all hooked together, that the capabilities of my users seems off. Like as it sits right now, with WordPress and bbPress together, I can’t even make a topic or reply.

I think that the problem takes places in bb-includes/capabilities.php, somewhere around line 29

$retvalue = call_user_func_array(array(&$bb_current_user, 'has_cap'), $args);

For me, this function returns nothing when the value is indeed true or 1 in the $bb_current_user array… But it only messes up when WordPress is included in the bb-config.php file, otherwise it’s fine…

[kevinjohngallagher]

Indeed JohnJames, you are right on many of your points (if not all).

I think we should do more to compliment where we’re similar to WordPress with BBpress. The code structure and website are two key issues, and i’ve mentioned a few more up above (trying not to be too boring and repeat myself).

Your points of the cross-polination ability of BBpress, by allowing topics to be tagged by multiple keywords, is 100% valid. It’s situational ofcourse, but i can see why it’s well liked.

My point was more… what do the end users think/want? If we say that we think all end users want little drilling down of categories or parent/child nodes, but instead to sift through tags that anotehr user might or might not have put on their post, then we are paramount to saying that every other piece of forum software has it wrong for the past 10 years. Thats quite massive.

I’m really glad I found BBpress, i’m glad to find such great developers and a good open community, but the more I see where we’re going the less flexible to other approaches we appear to be.

I mean, the BBpress core has a parent child hierarchy for forums, but doesn’t actually differentiate the outputted code apart form CSS. It basically treats it as a flat list. Surely, it’s clear that this hampers our theme developers. Because, lets be a little blunt here, they do all look somewhat similar.

[John James Jacoby]

You know, that WordPress is really an elaborate Forum clone, right?

Years ago, forums were threaded email responses back and forth that were documented hierarchically. Then, the idea of threads was cast away because it was thought to be too complicated to understand. Why would someone branch off to speak to a reply instead of replying to the original post/poster?

To me, it’s the nature of group discussion, and it is the difference between the intent of WordPress and bbPress, at least it was before WordPress 2.7 brought back threaded comments.

A forum is intended for multiple, typically registered commited users, and invokes group discussion that is often times allowed to skate off-topic as people reply to other people. Sometimes reply counts can escalate into the hundreds or thousands depending on the size of the forum.

A blog is intended to allow a few authors to create articles and attempts to cater to non-committed users that drop by, can leave a comment, and never look back if they don’t want to.

Since the emphasis of a blog is the initial post, comment replies typically tend to stay on topic.

Since the emphasis of a forum is to spark conversation, replies typically tend to drift off topic.

The funny thing is that both of these display methods use almost the exact same data storage and retrieval methods. Data is categorized and tagged as necessary, with a time-stamp, an excerpt, and other pertinent information.

The one major way that blogs differ from forums, is that forums restrict posts to one forum or category while blogs allow for one post to be in several. This ability inherently changes the emphasis away from categorization and towards the content of the post itself and how it relates to other possible posts.

I moved away from phpBB and towards WordPress for this specific attribute alone. Since posts can often times benefit from being in multiple categories, a blog style system makes a great deal of sense.

I think that the similarities between WordPress and bbPress exist only because they share a similar intent with data storage and categorization, and if you’ve ever read two books by the same author you’ll understand how both of them will read very similarly.

Overall I am happy that the authors of WordPress have made bbPress, as it shows a recognition of the distinct differences between the two of them.

I think as time passes, you will start to see more of how these two tools come from the same family but are different members all together. Think of them as fraternal twins.

[John James Jacoby]

Okay, I think I’ve experienced similar problems as most of you, and I just got mine working logging in and out from every angle with access to the admin panel on both. It still seems to hiccup a little when changing roles, so I am still trying to track that down, but I wanted to share where I am so far.

I am using the WordPress 2.7 beta 3 nightly build, and the bbPress 1.0 alpha 2. I am using various plug-ins and what-not and have akismet active on both.

My host is 1and1.com.

There are a few things that are of the utmost importance:

1. I recommend BEING LOGGED INTO WORDPRESS AS ‘admin’ with user_id of ‘1’ when you install bbPress. Any other Administrator account didn’t want to redirect to the admin panel properly. I assume the cookies will immediately conflict as they are shifted around, causing weird issues from the start.
2. BOTH -config.php files need to have the AUTH, SECURE, and LOGGED_IN KEYS defined correctly.
3. I personally also defined the SECRET_KEY in WordPress, although I’m not sure this is necessary yet.
4. bbPress needs to have the salts entered correctly during installation so that they match WordPress. Fortunately the link to the hidden admin panel is provided during the install so you can get them pretty conveniently. I personally did not have a secure_salt so I left it empty.
5. MUST add

   $bb->WP_BB = true;
   
   if (file_exists('../wp-blog-header.php'))
   
   require_once('../wp-blog-header.php');
   
   else
   
   if (file_exists('../../wp-blog-header.php'))
   
   require_once('../../wp-blog-header.php');

   or your personal equivalent to bb-config.php

6. I personally had to add

   define('COOKIE_DOMAIN', '');
   
   define('COOKIEPATH', '');

   to my wp-config.php to make it go.

7. Login to bbPress as ‘admin’ if you are already not, navigate to settings/wordpress integration, and adjust the role map accordingly.
8. Visit bb-admin/rewrite-rules.php page and copy the code
9. Put the following in a file named “.htaccess” file and place that file in the bbpress root directory:

   Options -MultiViews
   
   YOUR PREVIOUSLY COPIED CODE

   This is to make sure your URL’s are rewriting correctly.

10. Logout.
11. Clear all website cookies and attempt logging in either/or/both WordPress and bbPress. Access admin panels of both. Basically check for functionality.

That’s how I got mine working. Like I said, I’m still having issues assigning user roles for some reason, so I’ll try and figure that out next.

[kevinjohngallagher]

Hi Ipstenu,

thanks very much for taking the time to write back. I’m glad you saw this as a discussion and not something negative towards BBpress.

Maybe i wrote it wrong, but my point is not what “we” the internet community intend BBpress to be, but more what “they” the community of end users want it to be.

BBpress in it’s current form is just a blog. users log on, post a blog, people leave comments. There’s a list of tags, blog posts (sorry “topics”), and um… thats it.

I know, and you know, and i’m sure the intelligent people that have written this lovely bit of code know, that a forum and a blog are very very similar.

When I got into the simplicity of BBpress before the summer, I tried to convince a number of my fellow web enthusiasts to take up the cause. But the more they looked at it, the more disdain they had. I’ve stuck with it, and continue to do so of course, as i thought with each release getting closer to 1.0RC we’d get there.

But we’ve not created a forum.

Forums have a different mindset to Blogs, and don’t get me wrong i’m ok with using plug-ins, it’s just that we’re fixing bugs/issues with a Blog mindset. That is, blogs list things in a singular direction. Forums, by the nature in terms of what the END USER expects, work in a cross polination way.

Yes tags are a good idea, but tags are reliant on the end user.

To give an example:

I recently had to take down BBpress from a backpacker website because the users weren’t putting in tags. The plan being that instead of UK > Scotland > Edinburgh > Travel > Topic that users could just use the UK Travel forum and tag “edinburgh” or “london” etc. Instead, we had 100s of “how do i buy cheap bus tickets” or “cheapest way to travel” or “1 ticket spare” etc with NO tags.

The site lastest 6 weeks before the owner demanded I take it down and replace it with “actual forum software” – that’s a quote from their IT department btw.

But lets give a counter example:

Wordpress.org uses BBpress and it’s working great. Loads of Topics, tags, and few forums. No real need for categories. Same with the technorati one. It’s a credit to BBPress – and nothing can take away from that and the amazing work done by the BBpress team and community… BUT… there’s always a but isn’t there… the people that use WordPress/Technorati are people like us, they are technical, they are used to tags and searching for exactly what they want. They are *not* the typical end user on the internet.

I’m all for free form Ipstenu, i totally get what you mean, and if that suits the needs of your community then great. For me, its suits the needs of some of mine, the problem is as soon as we get into the territory of what people think “all forums” should do, BBpress really starts to look… well, not like a forum.

The more we code, the more we’re coding a wordpress clone, yet not cloning their proven and successful techniques. Our website should match their website (heck, screw the colours, just in terms of layout and user flow), our methods should match their methods. I, no WE, want to help, we want BBpress to be better, but more importantly we want it to fulfil it’s mission statement; and right now that’s not quite happening.

[Ipstenu (Mika Epstein)]

I keep thinking back on this, and I think you’re looking at it the wrong way. I’m not speaking to the HTML/Code side of it, but the concept side. The code side, yeah, some function I would consider default is missing (Unread, maybe Allow Images)

But what’s the difference between a Forum and a Blog?

A blog is a journal. Few people make new topics, many people reply. A forum is … a forum. Many people make new topics, many people reply.

If you feel the code of a Blog is better suited to how you want to run your forum, cool. You want to use the highly structured IPB or phpBB? Have at I picked bbPress not because of the WP integration (I could care less, really) but because it gave me more options than just Category -> Forum -> Topic -> Posts, and because it’s small and lacks a lot of those fancy options.

Example? I don’t use categories at all. Don’t need ’em. I have three ‘fora’ for high level organization. I went off the same general idea I use on my Blog. Three categories, a ton of tags.

1) About the site topic (screwdriver.com is about screwdrivers, talk about them)

2) About the Website (the code behind the site, suggestions, ideas, etc)

3) Everything else (screwdrivers are nice, but I have this hammer…)

Three big, broad categories/fora whatever. The tags I sort of let explode. And even then, I’m torn between structure and free form. I want a little structure (so you don’t get tags like ‘hammer’ and ‘hammers’ which really are the same thing), but I also want freedom.

So function. If you can get all that in a blog, have at Many people do and we call ’em LiveJournal Communities

[kevinjohngallagher]

So, the issue with the method implemented in : https://bbpress.org/forums/topic/hiding-subforums-subforums-from-subforum-pages

is that it only checks for the lineage of the forum before it.

This causes problems when you have multiple children to multiple children, as thus:

category

– Forum1

– – Child 1

– – – Child1’s child

– – Child 2

That method will make BBpress think that Child 2 is actually under Child1’s Child, because when testing if their parents are the same they clearly are not.

Instead, we have to create a nesting code that counts the depth to which we go as we trawl through each parent/child relationship – which is daft as there is a walker->depth function that we just don’t have access to via $GLOBALS.

EDIT:

Update – not knowing if it’s the last forum in a category is starting to kill me a little.

[kevinjohngallagher]

Well, there’s no good way of putting this without making it look like i’m flogging my own dead horse, but here goes:

Can someone tell me why we’re working out vital data in regards to each forum on as CSS links?

Why on Earth don’t we work out each attribute at the start of the loop, and then feed off an object, giving our template developers and therefore users far more options?

As it stands, we call bb_forum_class(); inside the TR, which then creates the $bb_forums_loop object; which calls classes();, and that works out all the attributes of the forum, but rather than sending them back as a usable object the whole thing returns a string of CSS code.

Why not allow template developers access to:

$bb_forums_loop->first_child

$bb_forums_loop->last_child

$bb_forums_loop->bb_root

etc?

I mean, the code itself if great, and the job you’ve done is really good, but it fixes one singular issue (getting the right CSS output), rather than fixing the bigger problem of not knowing all attributes of the forum. Not only does it lead to very messy templates (if someone can be bothered to deal with it – and i’ve not seen a template that has yet), but it does indeed duplicate alot of the work.

[kevinjohngallagher]

At the risk of looking like a double whammy in regards to the non nesting iterations of our outputted code, just using TRs with different classes, i’ve hit across another wee issue – but this time i’m sure there’s a simple solution I just can’t see the relavent code.

I want to be able to know if a forum has children or not, or more specifically when we move up or down a level in the “xPath” iteration.

I’m using a method of using $GLOBALS->forum_parent but what this currently requires me doing is testing to see if the forum has a parent that is not a category, then checking to see if the parent is the same as the previous forums parent, and then output relavent code to nest the forum in an actual parent child format:

Category

– Forum

– Forum

– – Forum

– – Forum

– Forum

This obviously creates havok and rather messy code for the closing of the nestings.

I realise that for small websites this will look like a formatting issue, but once you reach more than 2 levels in a parent child relationship, the ability to control nested relationships makes a huge difference.

Thanks for the help folks

EDIT:

Ok, i think i’ve found half the solution to the issue, and maybe i can phrase the question better now in BBterms…

I want to know, via PHP, before any code has been sent to the browser for the forum, if it is a FIRST CHILD or a LAST CHILD.

Now obviously, BBpress knows this because it’s outputting bb-last-child bb-first-child css, but how can I access these settings on the front-page.php ?

Thanks alot for all the help

[kevinjohngallagher]

Hi BBpress team,

I wanted to raise a concern I’ve had for sometime, but every time I think it’s the right thing to do, there’s a new release and I thought that maybe it’d be fixed. With 1.0 in alpha stage, I figure now’s a good time.

I think we’ve got a lot of this wrong.

Not the code, not the plugins, not the community, but more the mindset behind the important features. We’ve not built forum software, we’ve built blogging software.

We make posts, and people comment on them. The focus of BBpress is on individual posts with things like tags, as opposed to the forum/section/category to which it was posted. I also appreciate the desire to streamline the code base, which is wonderful, but users and the internet-public at large expect forums to have certain features – to rely on user updated plugins for these features is not an ideal solution.

I don’t say any of this to criticise, because you folks have done amazing work given the small team and smaller community working on BBpress, and I’m massively impressed; but I think given the scale of the project you’re working on you’d want real feedback.

Let me give an example if I may, which might illustrate the issue I and other users face.

In the 1.0alpha, we finally get Categories as standard, a feature that is absolutely essential for a forum (not a blog), otherwise the ‘forums’ are just a list of wordpress categories.

The problem with Categories, is that we don’t have ‘forums’ belonging to them, instead we have ‘forums’ that are called categories. A simple 1/0 in a db. But it’s not enough. Why?

Well it means that the loop in front-page.php to iterate through forums has to check to see if it’s a category. There is no independent check for categories and forums. This of course makes no difference in the world of all forums being in a singular table (the category can just be an individual TR and we can use a PHP continue to end the loop), but as soon as we move to multiple tables (which is essential for accessibility focussed websites), or nested divs this becomes quite useless.

What we need its:

Category

Forum

Topic

Forum

Topic

Topic

Reply

Reply

Each belonging to the parent above it. But we don’t have that in BBpress for categories. It’s massively short-sighted.

Now, this may seem like a simple thing, but I raise it as more of a mindset. We’re coming across a bug/issue/problem/feature request and we’re solving that specific request rather than seeing how it fits in. Take, if I may, the brilliant UNREAD POSTS plug-in by _CK_. When it was built it added a class to the specific span of the name of the topic post in the list of topics. Upon request it then did the same to the name of the forums. At no time was the thought process – wait a minute, if I put this at the top level item of the iteration that means that all child nodes can use it. _CK_ fixed this oversight yesterday and his plugin is now brilliant and easily rivalling the methodology used in the bigger forum solutions.

But it’s the mindset behind it I think we need to change. Fixing a singular problem, or even adding a new requested feature, without planning how it will impact others or if it’s at a high enough level is starting to make BBpress look amateurish.

I’m not saying we have to emulate the big boys and their massively bloated software, but what we have to accept, as a community, is that the likes of PHPbb and IPB etc. all do certain functions as standard, and these are what our users will expect.

I can’t see a roadmap or feature list for a finished 1.0 anywhere, I can’t even see a feature list for 1.5 anywhere (and yes I’ve been to the TRAC site for both). I just get the feeling as we move towards 1.0 release, that we’re not really releasing forum software, we’re releasing blogging software:

WordPress: categories > posts > comments

BBpress: forums > topics > replies

These are effectively one and the same. I’m quiety confident that someone could write a WP theme that effectively does what BBpress does. The BBpress front page list topics then forums (with the number of topics /posts in it). A WP page could list blog Posts titles and then categories (with the number of posts / comments in it). They are, to an end user, the one and the same.

I mean, was XML-RPC absolutely essential for BBpress? It seems to me that Categories, or the Unread Posts feature would be far more essential in that other forums have them. Why haven’t we used the same folder structure as WordPress so that we can easily convince wordpress users to also use BB? Heck why isn’t even our website set out in the same way (this may bring over some WP plugin creators)?

These things are not complains, and I do not raise them to flame or criticise in anyway, I merely hope to kick start a little discussion that can see us move BBpress forward. To often in the past few months I’ve suggested BBpress to friends or fellow developers and they’ve told me that it just doesn’t meet their needs – I think that’s something we need to fix, together

Kev

[mithrandir321]

Yeeees, exactly!!! with customizable text in email body

[chrishajer]

> My host says that getmypid is working.

> I built a php info file to check what modules

> were installed, and getmypid wasn’t there.

Well, one thing does not jive with the other. Either it’s enabled or it’s not. Do you have a choice between PHP4 and PHP5? Maybe they’re checking one version and you’re using another. If the web server uses PHP4 by default, but PHP5 is available, you can force PHP5 by adding this to the top of your .htaccess file:

AddType x-mapp-php5 .php

To check which version of PHP your pages are being served with, and to see if getmypid is disabled, save this into a file called info.php (or anything.php really):

<?php

phpinfo();

?>

 

Then access that at your host http://www.example.com/info.php, and see what it shows.

[mithrandir321]

Hello, I have this code (which comes from another support thread here) on my front-page.php:

<table id=”highest”>

<?php $top_topics = bb_top_topics(); ?>

<?php foreach ( $top_topics as $topic ) : ?> // line 70

<tr<?php topic_class(); ?>>

<td>“><?php topic_title(); ?>

</td>

<td class=”num”><div class=”rating-holder”><?php bb_rating();?>

<span class=”count”><?php bb_rating_count(); ?>

</span>

</div>

</td></tr>

<?php endforeach; ?>

</table>

And under it the code for latest topics.

It gives me this error:

Warning: Invalid argument supplied for foreach() in /home/home1/novapojistovna_cz/public_html/www/bbpress/bb-templates/kakumei/front-page.php on line 70

Can anybody help, please. Don’t quite understand what is wrong

Thanks

[Burt Adsit]

I just found your Options and Hybrid themes about 3 days ago. I know where have I been? These are *wildly* great themes for wp guy. Really nice job. I’ve been putting together a wish list for a theme and Options comes scarily close. Thanks for the great theme. Once again, I know, kick in some cash. I will. Can I pay rent first?